page_title: Patent medicine
section_title: The end of the patent medicine era
hierarchical_section_title: Patent medicine / The end of the patent medicine era
caption_attribution_description: English: The color cover for Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment. It features a description of the product's uses, and mr. Stanley wearing a hat with two snakes surrounding him.
context_page_description: A patent medicine, also known as a nostrum, is a commercial product advertised as a purported over-the-counter medicine, without regard to its effectiveness. It is typically characterized as pseudoscience.
  Patent medicines were one of the first major product categories that the advertising industry promoted; patent medicine promoters pioneered many advertising and sales techniques that were later used for other products. Patent medicine advertising often marketed products as being medical panaceas and emphasized exotic ingredients and endorsements from purported experts or celebrities, which may or may not have been true. Patent medicine sales were increasingly constricted in the United States in the early 20th century as the Food and Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission added ever-increasing regulations to prevent fraud, unintentional poisoning and deceptive advertising. Sellers of liniments, claimed to contain snake oil and falsely promoted as a cure-all, made the snake oil salesman a lasting symbol for a charlatan.
context_section_description: Muckraker journalists and other investigators began to publicize instances of death, drug addiction, and other hazards from the compounds. This took no small courage by the publishing industry that circulated these claims, since the typical newspaper of the period relied heavily on the patent medicines. In 1905, Samuel Hopkins Adams published an exposé entitled "The Great American Fraud" in Collier's Weekly that led to the passage of the first Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. This statute did not ban the alcohol, narcotics, and stimulants in the medicines; it required them to be labeled as such, and curbed some of the more misleading, overstated, or fraudulent claims that appeared on the labels.  In 1936 the statute was revised to ban them, and the United States entered a long period of ever more drastic reductions in the medications available unmediated by physicians and prescriptions. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who was active in the first half of the 20th century, based much of his career on exposing quacks and driving them out of business.
  In more recent years, also, various herbal concoctions have been marketed as "nutritional supplements".  While their advertisements are careful not to cross the line into making explicit medical claims, and often bear a disclaimer that asserts that the products have not been tested and are not intended to diagnose or treat any disease, they are nevertheless marketed as remedies of various sorts.  Weight loss "while you sleep" and similar claims are frequently found on these compounds (cf., Calorad, Relacore, etc.).  Despite the ban on such claims, salesmen still occasionally (and illegally) make such claims; Jim Bakker, a disgraced televangelist, sells a colloidal silver gel that he claims will cure all venereal diseases and SARS-related coronaviruses. One of the most notorious such elixirs, however, calls itself "Enzyte", widely advertised for "natural male enhancement" – that is, penis enlargement. Despite being a compound of herbs, minerals, and vitamins, Enzyte formerly promoted itself under a fake scientific name Suffragium asotas. Enzyte's makers translate this phrase as "better sex," but it is in fact ungrammatical Latin for "refuge for the dissipated".
caption: Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment.
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